


Target in Range

by Eisenschrott



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Deleted Scenes, Gen, Imperial Officers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 12:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5047681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eisenschrott/pseuds/Eisenschrott
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the battle of Endor, Palpatine issues a victory-or-death order; Moff Jerjerrod's day quickly goes from glorious to bad to horrible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Target in Range

The intercomm that linked the throne room and the firing control room pinged. Moff Jerjerrod straightened his shoulders and clutched his hands tighter behind his back. Although the comm was audio-only, when you heard that voice creep into your ears you always got this guts-deep certainty he was watching you. No matter from how far.

“Commander,” the Emperor said, “should the Rebels manage to blow up the shield generator—”

Jerjerrod’s more-than-half-empty stomach roiled.

“You will turn this battle station onto the Endor moon and destroy it.”

Plan R. “Yes, Your Highness.” Sweet stars, Plan R. Or rather, not the plan proper, as it had been drawn out, discussed and approved. The Emperor would have simply said, were it the case, _execute Plan R_. With this phrasing, he left out the part of the plan that dictated evacuation of the Sanctuary Moon land forces. If that was even feasible amidst a pitched battle. “But we have several battalions stationed on the moon…”

He felt not just watched—stared at, through uniform, flesh and bone, deep into the quivering tangle of his thoughts.

“You will destroy it.”

He drew a deep breath but his “Yes, Your Highness” reply came out thin and weak. As the comm clicked off, he glanced towards the chief gunner’s station; Captain Faidit gazed back at him from under the heavy black helmet visor.

By now, Jerjerrod had been a Moff long enough to mould his face into a confident smile in every weather, though confidence had been a hard sell since the first paperwork he’d filled in on Death Star II. “I’m sure it won’t come down to such extremes.”

“Yes, sir.” Looking not one iota more encouraged or convinced, Faidit busied himself fidgeting with the indicators on the targeting/firing console.

 

#

 

“Sir, the deflector shield is down.”

Jerjerrod turned abruptly, his jaw dropping.

“And we’ve lost all contact with the generator station,” went on Lieutenant Endicott, as calm as a freshly commissioned young officer could be when all the burden of an order falls upon someone else. Just peeking at him, all composure and eagerness to obey, was near intolerable.

“Position the station to blow up the moon,” he murmured. Half-hoping the lieutenant would not hear. Well, he didn’t say _yes sir_ …

Endicott stepped in front of Faidit’s console. His voice rang across the whole control room, “Commence rotation of main batteries.”

“Yessir.”

Jerjerrod moved a little to the side. His back raged with the cumulated ache of the months of desk work, his legs were screaming in his new boots— _you can’t come poorly dressed to a day that’ll go down in history_ , he recalled himself thinking early in the morning, in his cabin. Imagining the phrase printed on an entry of the Galactic Naval Encyclopedia. Mere hours ago that might have been years.

Outside the viewport, small vessels flitted in and out of sight, catching light reflections on space-tight metal and transparisteel. The moon lay down below, a peaceful shiny palette of blues, greens and whites, appearing always closer to the Death Star than navigation instruments claimed it to be.

Jerjerrod swallowed hard. Still close enough for the battle station and a sizable part, if not all of, the Imperial fleet to be caught in the blast along with the Rebels. His mind raced over calculations—the minutes it would take for a hyperspace micro-jump, supposing or rather praying the Death Star’s hyperdrive engines didn’t suffer a meltdown, and the several more minutes the fleet would need to recall the fighter squadrons and haul away from the battlefield… He gritted his teeth to smother a whimper. Whatever way you looked at it, the order meant a collective suicide. One which the admirals out there into the fray, loyal to the good cause and ready to make sacrifices as they were, would not take kindly.

Better they all died, remarked the wry side of him that sometimes doodled cock-shaped superlasers on the margins of datapad pages. If they did not die, afterwards they would come for him.

And if the Death Star didn’t retreat in time, if debris struck hard and the Emperor, Lord Vader and their prized prisoner (or defector, as the rumour mill insisted) Skywalker all went down with the station…

“…Sir?”

Jerjerrod gasped in surprise, and realised he’d been hyperventilating.

Endicott did not allow himself even a raised brow. “Are you unwell, sir?”

“Very observant of you,” he snarled through his teeth, then cleared his voice and tried his utmost to sound his usual cool, calm, and collected, “Faidit, recalibrate superlaser power to four percent.” Not enough to crack the celestial body to the core. So the Death Star and the fleet would not run risks. But enough to heat the atmosphere into a firestorm, cause major seismic shifts, and either burn or grind every lifeform on the surface to cinders. Including thirty-thousand odds Imperial personnel.

The gunnery officer’s eyes widened. “Yes, sir.” As he spoke the words, his hands were already skating over the firing controls.

Wisely, Endicott kept to himself his opinion on the watering-down of the Emperor’s order. Or violation of the order, from a more inflexible, more properly Imperial point of view.

 

#

 

The control room shook when the _Executor_ crashed bow-first on the Death Star’s southern hemisphere. Shook so bad Jerjerrod had to clutch the tactical console with all his strength to keep his balance. The technician sitting next to him dropped off her chair.

Jerjerrod could even watch the progress of the Super Star Destroyer from a monitor: a tiny red blinking triangle, closing in to the circular shape of the Death Star. The engineer inside him cursed a special blue streak for the loss of the sleek, top-notch dreadnought—and the damage it must have caused to the impact zone.

He dispatched Endicott to go there and see what he could do. By the sprinting leave the lieutenant took, Jerjerrod guessed he would much more likely hop on the first space-worthy tin can and hightail it.

To make matters worse, the throne room comm was silent. No incoming calls, no response to those Jerjerrod made, he himself at the console, not even trying to hide the tremor in his hands from the eyes of the technicians.

The floor and the walls, in the meantime, never stopped quaking. Quaking durasteel produced a dull, deep vibration, that in a few meagre minutes succeeded in replacing the hiss of Lord Vader’s respirator as spookiest noise in the galaxy.

“Sir,” said Faidit, “the Rebel fleet is moving to the unfinished portion of the station.”

“Concentrate all firepower on that sector.” He managed to sound like he was in command—which, lacking the Emperor, lacking Lord Vader, lacking even the Fleet Admiral, was the factual truth; _he_ was the only one left in command. He whose only contribution to the battle was pushing the button—well, issuing the order to push the button—of the superlaser.

And he was about to fire it on his own troops. To achieve what? Kill a few Rebels and native semi-sentients, at the price of an entire division of Imperials?

Jerjerrod straightened his belt, to give his unsteady hands something to cling onto. So _this_ was command. Sweet stars, if he survived today he was resigning his commission. He meant it. Truly meant it, unlike the million fatigue-induced escapist fantasies while drowning in bumf. He was signing off the military forever. Back to drawing blueprints for trash haulers.

“Point-oh-five to moon target.” Anxiety tore into Faidit’s almost mechanical voice, “Rebel fighters are entering the superstructure!”

Jerjerrod’s breath rasped with a held-back cry. “Open the parts discharge gates. Flood sectors 304 and 138. That should slow them up a bit.”

“Point-oh-three to moon target.”

He couldn’t tear his eyes off that target. Every planet looks pretty from orbit, as the saying went. The emerald green land masses and white billowy clouds of the Sanctuary Moon had never shone so brightly in the sunlight.

“Point-oh-two to moon target.”

Even if he opened a channel to order immediate evacuation, they would never make it off-planet on time. They wouldn’t have even if he had given the order earlier.

Not all of them would have. But some, at least.

He blinked back tears. _Damn it, why me?_

“Point-oh-one to moon target.”

Why wasn’t anyone higher-ranking than him around, now of all times? What would Vader do? Where in blazes was Vader anyway? Why had the throne room gone silent? What if Skywalker had carried a hidden blaster or a thermal detonator and killed them both, in the general unawareness while the battle raged—

“Moon target in range.”

Jerjerrod’s brain ground to a complete stop. He could hear his teeth chatter, but not tell if his body was shaking of its own accord or it was the constant groundquake of the artillery-battered station.

“Sir, moon target in range, now!”

He shut his mouth tight, clenching his jaw, and inhaled deeply. The recycled air carried a whiff of smoke. “Commence firing,” he spat out, bowing his head.

Faidit echoed the command to the secondary fire controls.

Jerjerrod gathered enough resolve to look up again at the moon. “Do not fire until my mark.”

“Sir, the Rebel fighters—”

“Please, don’t argue.”

“…Yessir.”

Jerjerrod rushed to the comm console. The technicians stared at him, and at each other.

“Open a ship-to-surface channel. As many frequencies as possible. Rebel, Imperial, doesn’t matter.”

It took the tech just a few seconds of typing, during which a frighteningly close explosion rocked the control room. Jerjerrod caught a sight of Faidit at his post. He’d taken off his helmet and was running a gloved hand through hair glistening with sweat. His eyes were shut.

“Channel open, sir,” said the tech.

Jerjerrod wetted his lips and leaned over the comm. “This is Moff Jerjerrod. By order of His Majesty the Emperor, this battle station is about to fire on the Endor moon. All land forces disengage, board a space vehicle and depart the moon at once. I repeat, all land forces depart the moon at once.” His voice broke into a fit of coughing. The air now was acrid, thin smoke curls already visible. The comm console was warm to the touch, reeking of molten components inside. “Death Star is about to open fire on the moon. Depart at once. This is your last warning.” He stepped backwards, leaning against the vibrating wall and forcing himself to breathe in the sickening mixture of fumes while they were still breathable.

The connection broke down before the tech had cut it off.

“The whole communications array is gone, sir,” she said ruefully. As if it had waited that moment when she wasn’t looking, the tactical monitor burst. The technician fell to the ground shrieking, flames engulfing her uniform and that of the man next to her.

The third tech bolted to the door. It didn’t slide open. He mashed keys on the lock, punched the durasteel door with both fists, all to no avail.

Faidit sat still in front of his console. His mouth moved without a sound and he held two fingers over his heart in some obscure prayer gesture.

“Fire,” Jerjerrod said. He could barely hear his own voice over the bangs at the door and the wail of strained durasteel. A split second later, the vibration changed pattern into a uniform thunder, mounting louder and closer.

It wasn’t the superlaser finally doing its duty—he could have told the difference any day, in much less dramatic circumstances. But he closed his eyes, pressed his face to the hot wall, and smiled pretending it was.

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr prompt: "please, don't argue".
> 
> Inspiration comes, word by word, from [the RotJ deleted scenes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EAifD072UM); although I understand why this subplot was cut from the final movie, I love it all the same. Lieutenant Endicott got a canon name, Faidit was just “unidentified DSII gunner” and I stole a name for him from 12th century troubadour Gaucelm Faidit, no particular deep reason behind it. Plan R, of course, comes from _Dr Strangelove_.


End file.
